The prior art includes various systems and methods for multiple users to access and/or use a single vehicle, such as, for example, in car sharing services and rental car services. Examples of car sharing services include Car2Go and ZipCar.
One example of a rental car service includes Silvercar. Historically, the Silvercar system has permitted a user of a smartphone running the Silvercar mobile application to scan a quick response (QR) code to identify a vehicle to access, send a message to a server with the QR code or data extracted from the QR code to identify the vehicle to the server. If the selected vehicle was available for rental, the server would then send a command to a vehicle computing device—independent of the user's smartphone—to unlock the doors of the vehicle and change the vehicle to a “rented” state. Communications between the server and the vehicle also typically required an enterprise mobile application (on an administrator device) to proxy the connection or relay messages between the vehicle and the server.